ABSTRACT
Sound can be looked at. Yes, you just read this sentence: Sound can be looked at. Yet, what can be seen of sound are mainly translations of the pressure waves – out of which any sound actually consists – into scores, diagrams, into sonograms. One sees the effects these pressure waves can take onto other objects, fluids, gases, onto elastic materials, onto the connected limbs of mechanical or electromechanical artifacts. As indirect as they are, these effects of sounds provide the contemporary forms of Anschauung, of theoria on sound in the early 21st century. Sound is vision these days as sound production, sound analysis, and sound technology are effectively operated mainly via the somewhat strange detour of visual displays. Should there be a natural order of the senses? A vast army of thinkers does affirm this assumption. They actually form the canonical literature of Western philosophy and theory, surely not only starting with Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and definitely not ending with Ferdinand de Saussure. These logocentrists did assume, implied or explicated in their writings, that a natural order of the senses does exist. According to this logocentric sensory anthropology the higher senses are situated closer to the visual perception of arguments and mathematical equations – and lower senses hence closer to seldomly reflected passions, affects, to momentary, idiosyncratic, and entangling impulses, to lust or to longing. More recently though a series of – as I like to call them – audiopietists (Schulze 2007) emerged like R. Murray Schafer, like Walter J. Ong or like Joachim-Ernst Berendt who argue as well for a natural order of the senses – though simply reversed: the higher senses are, for them, closer to individual affects and to intimacy, to passions, and to corporeal sensibilities – the lower senses though closer to the supposedly dry and alienating operations of writing and reading, measuring, and calculating. As a countermovement, this reversal of a normative sensory order is quite understandable, at times it could even be considered a kind of subversive or trickster move. Yet, the main fallacy of claiming a stable order of the senses regardless of historical and cultural transformations is truly not corrected by just claiming a different order as stable. Moreover, such audiopietists are not seldomly connecting their mission to anti-modernism and anti-urbanism, to an elitist disregard for popular and everyday cultures, even to technophobia and Luddism. Effectively, the mission of audiopietism is to promote the audiovisual litany that Jonathan Sterne did deconstruct so strikingly once and for all (Sterne 2012a: 8).
